A senior BT executive has said that regulators should force BSkyB to give new entrants to the UK pay-TV market a chance to win customers.

Marc Watson, the chief executive of TV at BT Retail, said that the UK sports pay-TV market was littered with casualties such as Setanta and ESPN that had taken on Sky and failed.

"Look at this market – two companies have been and gone in this market in two years," he said, speaking to journalists at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch on Thursday. "We are not the first to say there is a problem here. There are lots of rules regulating what we do at BT. We are looking for the same courtesy in TV and sport. We are just looking for parity."

BT's market capitalisation is double that of BSkyB's, at about £24bn, but the telecoms giant believes it needs help to make its £1bn investment to date in sports rights – with total running costs estimated by analysts to be £500m a year – pay off in the TV market.

"Although we are a big company in other areas, we are a new entrant in TV," he said. "And we need the opportunity to get going, to establish ourselves. We are starting out we have no customers, we are not dominant. It is much harder to chase us out of town, as we are a bigger business [but] we would like the opportunity to establish ourselves as a business. Sky sports is already established."

However, Watson also warned that the company does not intend to be the next fatality in the pay-TV market.

"We intend to stick around in this for the longterm, we aren't that easy to chase out of town," he said. "We do have the deep pockets to really compete in the market. With all due respect to other companies, we are not Setanta and we are not ESPN."

He said that unlike those two companies BT does not have to rely on customer sign-ups, and success for BT can come in a number of different guises.

The most obvious of these is protecting – and growing – its market-leading position in the broadband sector, which is being challenged by BSkyB.

"We do not win or lose solely on how many customers we sign up for our sports channel," he said. "We can win by retaining customers who might otherwise have left BT, [and] when they do leave, a lot of them have gone in the past to Sky, particularly broadband customers. We can win by selling more products to customers who are already with us. And we can win by starting new relationships with customers who wouldn't have considered BT before now."

Watson said he could not comment in an official capacity on what further sports rights BT might look to snap up. The company is currently in negotiations against rivals including Sky for the FA Cup rights, but said that it is not a stretch to consider cricket.

Cricket is the third-biggest sport in the UK, after football and rugby, with BT already having snapped up the TV rights for Premiership rugby.

"Lets talk at the theoretical level not the practical," he said. "Would we like some golf? That's tied up for a while... but if some opportunity comes up, yes, we'd look at that. Are we interested in cricket? Yes, it is one of the big three sports in the UK. We've got a big position in football and rugby and would we like one in cricket? In principle, in the theoretical, yes."

BSkyB's cricket rights come up in 2017, and golf in 2018, although negotiations are likely to start as long as two years before the end of the current contracts.

Watson said that BT has "deep pockets" but that it will be "strict" over what the company looks to pay for rights.

He also hinted that BT's much-hyped offer of "free" Premier League football – the company says there will be no cost beyond its broadband rental package – might not last that long.

"This is not a short-term offer, but we only do offers at 12 months at a time, we don't generally do offers longer than that," he said. "We'll review it as we review all our products and see how it is doing over the course of the next year. We will see how it's doing and decide what we do going forward. It is not a gimmick, it is intended to be a long-term offer, but we'll see."

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